DreamWorks SKG, Reliance Big Entertainment, Bay Films
Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Dianna Agron, Teresa Palmer, Callan McAuliffe, Kevin Durand, Jake Abel, Jeff Hochendoner, Patrick Sebes
John (Alex Pettyfer) is an unusual boy. He has moved from town to town all his life and is always the new kid. In fact, he tries to be invisible because in fact he is an alien. Life on his planet was destroyed with an evil monstrous alien race, the Mogadorians, who conquered their planet and killed all of the Lorians except 9 children who were given special powers and sent to Earth to colonize and maintain their race. John is Number Four. But the aliens are hunting them one by one in numerical order and killing them. Number 3 has been killed and John is next. He has a guardian, Henri (Timothy Olyphant), who aids him in his deadly fight to survive. But John is at home on Earth, and meets a special human girl, Sarah (Dianna Agron), with whom he falls in love. Now in addition to trying to save himself and his race from those who want to destroy him, but he’s honor bound to protect his girlfriend as well. Along the way John, Henri, and Sarah meet a few other friends who help with the fight.
This is a really good movie. It did not make back the sixty million it took to make it, but it seems to be doing good in it’s first week of rental release. Hopefully this is one of those films that will do very well in the rental category. I hope so, because it’s a very nice story. In the beginning, it’s fairly slow developing which gives us time to learn the back story of where John came from and at the same time, gives us the opportunity to know him and what kind of person he is. It’s a love story, high school, with the usual gang of geeks and bullies, and very much like the Twilight series with aliens instead of mythical creatures. Then in the last half, it catches on and gets really action packed as the bad guys show up and a huge showdown is inevitable. This is Twilight like as well. It’s a fresh story though, even though it’s similar. The special effects and the creatures are spectacular, and the fight scenes are awesome.
I had a lot of technical difficulties with the DVD I received from NetFlix though. I’m not sure whether it was just that one disk, or if something else was wrong, but I could not play it with WinDVD on the laptop, and my two DVD players failed. Finally I tried an old DVD burner that I have had for years, and it played, although several times I got “bad media” errors, and a couple times the DVD froze and had to be restarted to make it work again. But it was certainly worth the effort, and I am happy I was able to see it and not have to return it as unwatchable. I hope other copies of the disk do not have similar problems, as the disk itself is brand new, and looks pristine.
I certainly hope this stunning science fiction film does well in rentals, as we know of 5 of the 9 people, but still have 4 to find out about, where they are and what they are up to. And we know they have ugly bad guys coming to look for them. The ending is perfectly setup for a sequel, but it may never get made if the film does not find its legs. It would be a shame to miss the rest of the stories, for sure.
I recommend this film for anyone who is a science fiction fan, as it is a great alien adventure.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
